With the example of the case of Dongsanxiang in Beijing, this paper proposes to integrate the ecological infrastructure and the land use planning approaches so as to control urban expansion and protect the landscape resources in rural areas.

Abstract

With the fast urbanization process in metropolitan urban fringe areas, land use planning is now facing two conflicting tasks: how to meet the land demand of urban development under the condition of protecting regional ecological environment efficiently; how to strengthen the urban-rural linkage without disappearance of local landscape which in most cases caused by urban sprawl. In Beijing, Dongsanxiang is so typical a urban fringe area that one foot of urbanization has already stepped into it. Based on the case study, this paper insists that land use planning should be based on an ecological infrastructure (EI) planning, which can lead to a smart growth of urban areas after the ecological security pattern has been set up, and union urban and rural areas while either of them keeps their own landscape characteristics. Firstly, the paper focuses on the problems of the current land use planning methodology in China, such as the decrease of green space and farmland due to improper protection. Secondly, the paper introduces the process of EI planning in Dongsanxiang area. In the third part which is the most important, it is stated how to guide land use planning based on EI: 1) the non-constructive area has been planed according to the EI pattern, and the corresponding land management and control policies have also been constituted; 2) with the trend of multifunctional land use, more basic farmland which must be strictly protected according to the law has been planned within the EI pattern; 3) the bio security pattern, water security pattern, culture and recreation security pattern are applied to induct respectively different industrial and residential land use layout.